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The waters lapping up along the Lake Erie shoreline are no longer orange. The lake doesn’t smell as bad as it once did. And talk of “a dead lake” has been put in the distant past. The water even looks bluer, clearer – and more alive. But appearances can be deceiving. Lake Erie – the focus of cleanup efforts for four decades – is still, in many ways, simmering just below crisis.

Instead of industrial slag, chemical pollutants and blazing rivers – infamous trademarks of Lake Erie during the Rust Belt’s heydey – that choked nearly all life out of the water, the lake remains under assault on several fronts: